Thursday, 6 June 2024
While Allan went boating, I did some garden puttering. First, and sadly, I cut down my Grevillea victoriae to the ground. It shows little sign of recovering from the cold snap and has never looked 100 percent good. (The sign hanging in it was for the garden open day.)
It is sad because Steve and John, who moved away from their beloved-to-many bayside garden brought it back from Portland for me several years ago, but I still have the rhododendron that they gave me.
Commemorated by a sun spot on the lens:
Somehow I cannot get that one area to fill in as a sight blocker. If only I had planted one of the thriving pittosporums there!
The “table gate” entrance to the back garden is draped low with Paul’s Himalayan Musk rose, that I will trim when it is done blooming.
I did some half moon edging on parts of two lawn paths, newly curvy ones that needed some refining.
Being some pretty minor edging, it didn’t get any before and after photos.
It was enjoyable working next to the sunny garden beds, despite a fierce wind that made the blue tarp “wall” flap loudly.
The wind blew over the trellises that were stored against the west fence. Soon enough, the escallonias will fill in there.
I sifted some compost from bin three to bin two.
Bin one is now the place to put debris that can go through our not so great little chipper-shredder.
Got this much compost:
While taking the compost to the bed where I had dug out a lot of fringe flower, I found fungi.
The bins after today’s sifting:
I picked some arugula and after a recent disappointing harvest of one set of radishes, in a different fish tote veg box, I found some big white icicle radishes that I thought would be bitter but which proved to be the most mild, delicious radishes I have ever had.
I read for a couple of hours before Allan came home early enough that I didn’t even worry.
some political reading
I finished The White Bonus and hereby offer up some take aways.
Beautiful prose:
“If American life is a river, relief from poverty and strife sits atop one of its slippery banks, and the American Dream sits safely back from its edge. Few of us manage to plant our feet firmly enough in that soil to have no fear of it falling away; fewer still are born there in the first place. Most of us, instead, start out somewhere in the water and do what we can to make it across. Family wealth determines our starting point. Economic class is the distance we must cover.”
About the longterm effect of the GI Bill (for war veterans) on generational wealth: “...the G.I. Bill covered tuition and living expenses for veterans approved for study. The policy launched many poor and working-class white men into the professional middle class that defined mid-century affluence, and doubled the number of college graduates nationwide. Yet, at the insistence of southern politicians–and the quiet acceptance of many northern politicians- the educational benefit required the approval of local officials, which meant that any Black veteran seeking to use their benefit would need the approval of local, white officials. This gatekeeping meant that white veterans were dramatically more likely to see their military service open the door to a college education. Indeed, while the G.I. Bill was in theory available to any veteran, use of its benefits was deeply segregated. Today, many scholars regard the post war G.I. Bill as a source not only of social mobility (for whites), but of racial disparity, too.”
[My mother was a veteran, too; I wonder if the GI benefits were offered to her?]
“The rewards organized under the G.I. Bill were legion. Veterans could get their full tuition and living expenses at a college, university, or vocational education program covered by the government. Vets who wanted to apprentice, rather than study, could earn a subsistence wage while completing on-the-job training. Vets who wanted to buy a home could get plenty of help: No down payments, modest interest rates, and thirty-year terms combined to make it possible for veterans from the working class to own a home. If you were a veteran who wanted to build a mid-century American Dream, the G.I. Bill had the tools you needed. And yet, as Ira Katznelson details at length in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, few of the bill’s resources went to Black vets.”
“Take, for instance, the Veterans Administration mortgages, which funded nearly one million homes from 1946 to 1951. While the government would back the mortgage and offer favorable terms, the actual financing had to go through a private bank. To buy a home, a Black vet would need to find a bank willing to give a loan-for a house in a neighborhood the VA, which used FHA standards to assess homes, would approve.” The book tells the history of how that turned out.
As for education, “Educational benefits in the G.I. Bill were little different. To use the grant, Black vets needed to get approval from local bureaucrats, who typically harbored prejudices that could pose barriers to access. Once approved, they would need to find a college that would accept them.” Among details of how THAT turned out: “Black southern colleges, combined, had to turn away 55 percent of veteran applicants for lack of space.”
This to me is the crux of the matter in my life, in that my father and my uncle benefited greatly from the GI Bill, especially my uncle, who used it to go to college and became a wealthy accountant, and when I was 25, he had taken possession of my grandmother’s house when she fell victim to dementia, and he sold it to me when no one would have considered a poor, self employed housecleaver for a mortgage. He took a meager downpayment and, as I later learned when I had to refinance (because he set it up so a balloon payment was due in seven years), financed the mortgage in a way that shocked a bank officer who said to me, “A FAMILY MEMBER did this?!” But the result nevertheless was that I am a homeowner to this day, now without a mortgage, which enables me have the seasonal gardening career that I love. The effect of the GI Bill on my family turned into a degree of generational wealth for me.
Some things I learned about labor (I knew some, but far from all of this): “One of the centerpieces of the New Deal, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, established a minimum wage and the forty-hour work week, but it didn’t apply to all workers. Agricultural workers, the majority of whom, at the time, were Black workers in the South, didn’t get protected. Neither did service workers, including workers doing housework in private homes, in laundries, in hotels and restaurants, even in hospitals. Legislators excluded the same workers from Social Security benefits, and excluded agricultural and domestic workers from the right to organize unions, too.”
“Every piece of New Deal legislation related to labor excluded certain jobs from coverage. The jobs that gained labor protections were, in the 1930s, mostly held by white, male workers; the excluded ones, by workers who were Black, female, or both. As a result, Social Security only applied to 13 percent of Black women who worked, and 46 percent of Black workers overall. Meanwhile, more than half of American-born white workers, and two-thirds of white immigrant workers, had jobs that were covered, and gained access to old-age protection.”
This really shocked me about nurses having been excluded: “It took decades for most of the excluded jobs to come under the protection of law–including hospital workers like nurses.”….”In 1966, amid the adoption of federal civil rights legislation, hospital workers and farmworkers gained the right to minimum wages…” …..”In 1974, hospital workers gained the right to organize, the same year that domestic workers gained the right to minimum wage.” 1974!! I’d been out of high school for a year.
Another mind boggling thing that I learned: Some states charge prisoners for their lodging. “…a 1997 Connecticut law that charges incarcerated people room and board for their time served. Initially, the state charged incarcerated people $31,755 a year for their room and board. By 2022, it was charging $90,885 a year.”
The book is part memoir. I figured that the author would be criticised for putting so much of her personal story in it. The book consists of about equal parts of pertinent stories of other folks and families, and history and details about discrimination and privilege, and the rest is her own story. As a memoir, I was interested in her story, too, and I consider the book as a whole to be a gift of knowledge and insight. What to do about that knowledge is the question that has haunted me since I first joined friends in “study groups” about racism and classism in the 1970s, and I don’t have good answer for me (partly considering where I live). The book Waking Up White first brought home the history of the GI Bill to me (although I already knew about redlining, AKA racism in real estate, in my home city of Seattle, thanks to a progressive high school teacher). I guess one tiny reparation I can try to make is to share information from what I read.
Never doubt the value of sharing your insights from your reading. For myself, I read more news and politics from the NYT and WaPo, and a few blogs. Rarely do they get into the weeds about the topics you often read about in books. Again for myself, I find nonfiction infinitely more engaging when the author includes his/her story, and narratives from others’ lives. Who didn’t have a high school teacher (like yours) who made history come alive by including stories, versus the one who “taught from the book?” Highly referenced history books rich with footnotes add to the scholarship, but do they actually reach the people? Your blog, Skyler, improves all of our lives for that reason. Your experience of generational wealth for example. Nothing illustrates and enlivens better than a personal experience. Thank you.
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Your book review and insights leave one much to think about. The VA and its treatment of veterans is another issue. I know a few vets who have had their share of troubles with that agency. One woman vet I knew was laughed at and dismissed for having a lump on her leg. Later was discovered it developed a sarcoma and she died. She couldn’t get anyone at the VA to take her seriously.
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That is terrible…what happened to the woman vet you knew. I’ve heard some stories of medical neglect from vets of my acquaintance, too.
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Her name was Christine. She loved the color blue, and I think of her when I see blue flowers.
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I don’t know why I’m so shocked but I had no idea about these ugly facts. Thank you for sharing them.
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I appreciate hearing that it is significant to get them out there. I thought I knew a lot about this topic but I certainly learned more from this book.
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You asked about our little shredder. It sounds as though it is much the same as your ‘pencil sharpener’, but I like it.
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